News archive

The German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media is placing 50,000 euros at the disposal of the International Tracing Service (ITS). The funds are from the commissioner’s special program for the preservation of written cultural heritage.

Why is the #StolenMemory campaign important? What planning is needed to move an archive? What preparations does the ITS make before publishing large sections of its holdings online? And how many people sent inquiries in 2017 in search of information about victims of Nazi persecution? The ITS Annual Report answers these...

From the new e-Guide to documentED, a tailored service for preparation and follow-up on visits to memorials, the June 2018 edition of the magazine “Lernen aus der Geschichte” (Learning from History)—entitled “Learning with Documents: The Educational Work of the ITS”—is devoted to the work of the International Tracing...

Christiane Weber, a research associate in the ITS Department of Research and Education, has been working on implementing the e-Guide project since May 2017. To that end, she investigated the historical background of documents from the concentration camps. In the interview she talks about her fascinating research and...

Important knowledge for today’s society from files on emigration after 1945: Professor Christoph Rass and his study group at Osnabrück University use the ITS online archive and he also introduces his seminar students to the questionnaires published there.

Retrace the footsteps of Jewish children in Berlin – now it’s possible with the “Marbles of Remembrance” app. An international team developed it late last year at the culture hackathon “Coding da Vinci” in Berlin. The basis for this and another project was the card file of the Reich Association of Jews which the...

The historian Dr. Bernd Joachim Zimmer of Bad Arolsen, who had close ties to the International Tracing Service (ITS) through his research, died in May 2018. The studied math and physics teacher had set himself the task of investigating the history of the city of Bad Arolsen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Malgorzata Przybyla, an employee at the International Tracing Service (ITS), recently returned the personal possessions of a former concentration camp prisoner to his relatives in Poland. The objects included a signet ring. It played a special role in the search for this family.

With a team of experienced curators at their side, Isabel Panek, Henning Borggräfe and Christian Höschler are presently preparing the first permanent exhibition on the ITS past and present, scheduled to open in 2019. In the interview, they explain what the show’s main focusses will be and what challenges they face.

Gershon Willinger was born in Amsterdam on 24 September 1942. His parents had fled Germany. But after the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany, the persecution of the Jews also started there. Guido and Edith Helene Willinger were among the more than 100,000 Jews deported from the occupied Netherlands to the...